We can compare Tea Party and Black Lives Matter as single-issue interest groups. We can also consider what happened to these groups after they decided to align with multi-issue interest groups, or major political parties.

The Kennedy School knew its decision to recognize Chelsea Manning as a visiting fellow would be controversial. When objections came, straight from the CIA no less, the Kennedy School embarrassingly chose to align itself with the agency that mistreated prisoners as a matter of policy.

Equifax suffers a hit to its reputation, and must endure a few news cycles where people write articles like this one. Come Christmas, they’ll be back to business as usual, except they will try to have more safeguards in place. They will hope the next group of criminals is not so clever. Believe me, the hope is vain.

Police have a lot of ways to kill you, a lot of excuses for doing it. Michael Bennett was correct to wonder if he would see his family again. How did Bennett disguise himself as a criminal? We can only guess. You will never hear an apology, or an explanation from the officers who mistreated him.

If we want to counter this unhappy impulse to know everything about everyone, we ought to mock authorities’ incompetence, ridicule their foolishness, and make fun of their badly conceived deceits before they feel assertive enough to end free-spirited criticism.